• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.84-85
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• 2005

Dislocations are often found at Shallow Trench Isolation (STI) process after repeated thermal cycles. The residual stress after STI process often leads defect like dislocation by post STI thermo-mechanical stress. Thermo-mechanical stress induced by STI process is difficult to remove perfectly by plastic deformation at previous thermal cycles. Embedded flash memory process is very weak in terms of post STI thermo-mechanical stress, because it requires more oxidation steps than other devices. Therefore, dislocation-free flash process should be optimized.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers C
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• v.50 no.9
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• pp.438-443
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• 2001

In the shallow trench isolation(STI)-chemical mechanical polishing(CMP) process, the key issues are the optimized thickness control, within-wafer-non-uniformity, and the possible defects such as pad oxide damage and nitride residue. The defect like nitride residue and silicon (or pad oxide) damage after STI-CMP process were discussed to accomplish its optimum process condition. To understand its optimum process condition, overall STI related processes including reverse moat etch, trench etch, STI fill and STI-CMP were discussed. Consequently, we could conclude that law trench depth and high CMP thickness can cause nitride residue, and high trench depth and over-polishing can cause silicon damage.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.3 no.4
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• pp.5-9
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• 2002

Chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) has become the preferred planarization method for multilevel interconnect technology due to its ability to achieve a high degree of feature level planarity. Especially, to achieve the higher density and greater performance, shallow trench isolation (STI)-CMP process has been attracted attention for multilevel interconnection as an essential isolation technology. Also, it was possible to apply the direct STI-CMP process without reverse moat etch step using high selectivity slurry (HSS). In this work, we determined the process margin with optimized process conditions to apply HSS STI-CMP process. Then, we evaluated the reliability and reproducibility of STI-CMP process through the optimal process conditions. The wafer-to-wafer thickness variation and day-by-day reproducibility of STI-CMP process after repeatable tests were investigated. Our experimental results show, quite acceptable and reproducible CMP results with a wafer-to-wafer thickness variation within 400$\AA$.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 1999.05a
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• pp.501-504
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• 1999

In the shallow trench isolation(STI) chemical mechanical polishing(CMP) process, the key issues are the optimized thickness control within- wafer-non-uniformity, and the possible defects such as nitride residue and pad oxide damage. These defects after STI CMP process were discussed to accomplish its optimum process condition. To understand its optimum process condition, overall STI related processes including reverse moat etch, trench etch, STI filling and STI CMP were discussed. It is represented that the nitride residue can be occurred in the condition of high post CMP thickness and low trench depth. In addition there are remaining oxide on the moat surface after reverse moat etch. It means that reverse moat etching process can be the main source of nitride residue. Pad oxide damage can be caused by over-polishing and high trench depth.

• Proceedings of the IEEK Conference
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• 1999.06a
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• pp.911-913
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• 1999

Shallow Trench Isolation (STI) has become the most promising isolation scheme for ULSI applications. The stress of STI structure is one of several factors to degrade characteristics of a device. The stress contours or STI structure vary with the trench depth. Isolation characteristics of STI was analyzed as the depth of trench varied. And transistor characteristics was compared. Isolation punch-through voltage for n$^{＋}$ to pwell and p$^{＋}$ to nwell increased as trench depth increased. n$^{＋}$ to pwell leakage current had nothing to do with trench depth but n$^{＋}$ to pwell leakage current decreased as trench depth increased. In the case of transistor characteristics, short channel effect was independent on trench depth and inverse narrow width effect was greater for deeper trenches. Therefore in order to achieve stable device, it is important to minimize stress by optimizing trench depth.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers C
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• v.52 no.10
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• pp.441-446
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• 2003

The chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) process is now widely employed in the ultra large scale integrated (ULSI) semiconductor fabrication. Especially, shallow trench isolation (STI) has become a key isolation scheme for sub-0.13/0.10${\mu}{\textrm}{m}$ CMOS technology. The most important issues of STI-CMP is to decrease the various defects such as nitride residue, dishing, and tom oxide. To solve these problems, in this paper, we studied the planarization characteristics using slurry additive with the high selectivity between $SiO_2$ and $Si_3$$N_4$ films for the purpose of process simplification and in-situ end point detection. As our experimental results, it was possible to achieve a global planarization and STI-CMP process could be dramatically simplified. Also, we estimated the reliability through the repeated tests with the optimized process conditions in order to identify the reproducibility of STI-CMP process.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.5 no.5
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• pp.169-172
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• 2004

Deep sub-micron device required to get the superior ultra thin gate oxide characteristics. In this research, I will recommend a novel shallow trench isolation structure(STI) for thin gate oxide and a $N_2$O gate oxide 30 $\AA$ by NO ambient process. The local oxidation of silicon(LOCOS) isolation has been replaced by the shallow trench isolation which has less encroachment into the active device area. Also for $N_2$O gate oxide 30 $\AA$, ultra thin gate oxide 30 $\AA$ was formed by using the $N_2$O gate oxide formation method on STI structure and LOCOS structure. For the metal electrode and junction, TiSi$_2$ process was performed by RTP annealing at 850 $^{\circ}C$ for 29 sec. In the viewpoints of the physical characteristics of MOS capacitor, STI structure was confirmed by SEM. STI structure was expected to minimize the oxide loss at the channel edge. Also, STI structure is considered to decrease the threshold voltage, result in a lower Ti/TiN resistance( Ω /cont.) and higher capacitance-gate voltage(C- V) that made the STI structure more effective. In terms of the TDDB(sec) characteristics, the STI structure showed the stable value of 25 % ～ 90 % more than 55 sec. In brief, analysis of the ultra thin gate oxide 30 $\AA$ proved that STI isolation structure and salicidation process presented in this study. I could achieve improved electrical characteristics and reliability for deep submicron devices with 30 $\AA$ $N_2$O gate oxide.

• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.23-30
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• 2002

An STI(Shallow Trench Isolation) by using a CMP(Chemical Mechanical Polishing) process has been one of the key issues in the device isolation[1] In this paper we fabricated N, P-MOSFEET tall analyse hump characteristics in various rounding oxdation thickness(ex : Skip, 500, 800, 1000$\AA$). As a result we found that hump occurred at STI channel edge region by field oxide recess. and boron segregation(early turn on due to boron segregatiorn at channel edge). Therefore we improved that hump occurrence by increased oxidation thickness, and control field oxide recess( 20nm), wet oxidation etch time(19HF,30sec), STI nitride wet cleaning time(99HF, 60sec+P 90min) and fate pre-oxidation cleaning time (U10min+19HF, 60sec) to prevent hump occurring at STI channel edge.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers Conference
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• 2002.10b
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• pp.443-444
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• 2002

The uniformity of field oxide is critical to isolation property of device in STI, so the control of field oxide thickness in STI-CMP becomes enormously important. The loss of field oxide in shallow trench isolation comes mainly from dishing and erosion in STI-CMP. In this paper, the effect of slurries on the dishing was investigated with both blanket and patterned wafers were selected to measure the removal rate, selectivity and dishing amount. Dishing was a strong function of pattern spacing and types of slurries. Dishing was significantly decreased with decreasing pattern spacing for both slurries. Significantly lower dishing with ceria based slurry than with silica based slurry were achieved when narrow pattern spacing were used. Possible dishing mechanism with two different slurries were discussed based on the observed experimental results.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers Conference
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• 2002.05a
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• pp.272-278
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• 2002

Recently, STI(Shallow Trench Isolation) process has attracted attention for high density of semiconductor device as a essential isolation technology. In this paper, the effect of pattern density, trench width and selectivity of slurry on dishing in STI CMP process was investigated by using specially designed isolation pattern. As trench width increased, the dishing tends to increase. At $20{\mu}m$ pattern size, the dishing was decreased with increasing pattern density Low selectivity slurry shows less dishing at over $160{\mu}m$ trench width, whereas high selectivity slurry shows less dishing at below $160{\mu}m$ trench width.